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Abstract

Nowadays, virtual enterprise (VE) is a crucial paradigm of business management in an agile environment. VE exists in both service and manufacturing organizations, although the complexity of each enterprise in a VE may vary greatly from industry to industry. Obviously, there is a need for a mechanism through which these different functions can be integrated together transparently. In this contribution, we focus on the negotiation process in VE formulation as a basic research to clarify its effective management in terms of partner search. Each enterprise in VE is defined as an agent with multiutilities, and a framework of multiagent programming with game theoretic approach is newly proposed as a negotiation algorithm among the agents. Each unit is defined as an agent in our VE model, and their decision making is formulated as a game theoretic methodology. We develop a computer simulation model to form VEs through multiple negotiations among several potential members in the negotiation domain, and finally clarify the formulation dynamism with the negotiation process.